Sean Jacobs's Blog, page 171
June 15, 2020
The violence within us
Railway through Cape Flats from N2. Image credit Angus Willson via Flickr CC.
For the past few weeks the United States has been burning. Political protests spread quickly across the country after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, an unarmed African American man. From that point onwards, news and social media feeds everywhere were inundated with images of broken windows, blazing cars, and police beatdowns. President Donald Trump reacted by calling for “justice��� for the Floyd family and ���law and order��� for the activists.
Whether or not you buy this story depends largely on how you define the term ���violence.��� Trump���s comments locate violence squarely in the acts of bad actors on both sides���protesters and police���who can easily be identified and punished. The solution seems simple enough. Those that study violence might argue that it is too simple.
���Violence can never be understood solely in terms of its physicality���force, assault, or the infliction of pain���alone,��� writes Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Philippe Bourgois, two scholars of the subject. They argue that rebellious protest and police brutality are not discrete acts, but rather points along a ���continuum of violence ��� that also includes assaults on the personhood, dignity, sense of worth or value of the victim.��� Viewing violence along a continuum sees it as a series of interrelated forces���ranging from murder, to racism, to poverty���that conspire together as common forms of coercion and abuse to limit the lives, status, movement and opportunities of victims.
My own research is not about acts perpetrated by protesters or police, but about those perpetrated by gangs. It is based in Cape Town, South Africa, one the world���s top tourist cities, and also one of its deadliest. Like the US, South Africa has its own history of racial oppression. In 1948, the South Africans implemented a policy of ���apartheid������meaning separateness���that institutionalized racial segregation across the country. White minority rule ended over 25 years ago, yet poverty, inequality, segregation, and insecurity still delineate the racial contours of South African cities.
Surrounded by a coastline that straddles the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, Cape Town is as glossy as a travel brochure, full of scenic vistas of Table Mountain, busy restaurants and bustling shops. Only a short drive from the city center, however, rival gangs fight bloody battles to control drug turf in the poor township communities where most of the city���s black and coloured population lives. Lots of white Capetonians will bemoan the lack of safety in their city. But, like me, the vast majority live in its center and suburbs, and do not experience anything close to the levels of violence found in townships.
Most city dwellers also forget���or ignore���the other ways they are connected to that violence. For one, poverty on periphery is the cheap labor supply that drives a high standard of living for those with wealth. This is the polished flip side of the so-called gang problem. What makes the city such an ���affordable��� destination for foreigners like myself, is the same thing that makes so many thousands of young Capetonians turn to gangs for income and empowerment. Policing in the city is also focused on fortifying the restaurants and shops of the downtown core, while conflict in township communities is merely controlled and contained. Without protection from police and courts, more youngsters join gangs. Others still, who are kept out of the city���s beaches and restaurants because of racism, likely find gangs more welcoming.
What is happening in Cape Town today is the result of a form of ���neo-apartheid��� that has outlived South Africa���s transition to democratic rule in 1994. Contemporary Cape Town���s black and coloured working classes remain trapped in extreme poverty, located at an arm���s length from middle-class���and mostly white���centers of commerce, tourism and leisure. Unable to access the basic amenities of life, up to 100,000 people have turned to gangs. Cape Town might seem a world away from Minneapolis, but the lessons for Americans are clear: violence exists on a tangled social continuum. Gangs are violent; but so is hunger; homelessness is also cruel and pitiless; inequality, racism and segregation are too; all in ways that are interwoven and inseparable.
Phillipe Bourgois, one of the researchers who studied the ���continuum of violence,��� did so against the backdrop of ���American inner-city apartheid.��� It is a phrase he coined to encapsulate the everyday oppression found in marginalized communities in the US, where murder rates are many times higher than those of other industrial nations, and expedient arrest and incarceration take the place of equitable access to shelter, employment, sustenance and health. Most of American society does not see this side of itself, however, ���because drug dealers, addicts, and street criminals internalize their rage and desperation. They direct their brutality against themselves and their immediate community rather than against their structural oppressors.��� Bourgois encouraged readers to avoid stark judgements of the people in his study, stating instead that “���mainstream America��� should be able to see itself in the characters presented on these pages and recognize the linkages. The inner city represents the United States��� greatest domestic failing.��� All of society was explicitly implicated in the continuum of violence Bourgois wrote about.
If Bourgois is right, then law and order initiatives are unlikely to bring peace or justice, as Trump has claimed. Anyway, America has tried this approach. South Africa has had its own tendencies towards militarized criminal justice, sending the army into townships to fight gangs���also without effect. Failure in both locations suggests that what is needed is not law and order, but rather a complete reformation of the current order of things. Accepting a more encompassing definition of violence helps make this clearer, by refocusing the emphasis for violence prevention away from aggressive criminal justice tactics, towards a broader spectrum of solutions like: community development, social services, recovery programs, mental health interventions, etc. Indeed, it is a perspective that reflects demands of anti-racism activists that policing is defunded and reconceptualized.
In a country like the US, which considers itself a society above others, it may be particularly difficult to face the many ways in which it is complicit in the killing of somebody like George Floyd; but if people will look, they will see the everyday violence that makes African Americans 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white people; the violence of a poverty rate that is 2.5 times as high for black people as it is for whites; the violence of higher rates of black arrest and imprisonment, and lower rates of employment, educational attainment and home ownership.
This round of unrest is already flaming out. The police that killed George Floyd may or may not go to jail in the coming months. The media interest will surely move on soon. But the continuum of violence in the US will inevitably continue. As more black people die, demonstrations will eventually flare up again as well, unless Americans start to see both street rebellion and police brutality as part of a system of aggression that is continuous and insidious. For if one is to censure such acts, one must also censure the systems that sustain them, as well as the role that wider society plays in perpetrating them. Anybody unwilling do so also becomes culpable, by making him or herself an accessory to murder through ignorance and inaction.
Representing northern Ghana
Still from Azali.
Ghana���s first ever submission to the Oscars International Feature Film category was in 2020, for the 2018 film Azali. In the end, the 2020 Oscar was won by the now legendary Korean film, Parasite. Azali is still available on Netflix. Despite losing out to Parasite, it is refreshing to see the diversity of Ghanaian-ness represented in Azali, especially its depictions of Northern Ghana.
Azali follows the life of a 14-year-old girl who escapes child marriage and is sent away by her mother to have a better life elsewhere. Amina ends up in the merciless streets of the capital Accra, where she engages in kayayo (as a market porter) and becomes a victim of child prostitution.
While film was used by the British colonial government as a tool of colonial propaganda to ���civilize��� the native, film on the African continent has grown tremendously, with Nollywood leading in its ability to increasingly globalize its content (read: Netflix Naija). Still, the Ghanaian film industry has been in decline for decades, and several scholars attribute this decline to piracy, the importation of Nollywood films, poor quality films and a lack of governmental support to the industry, among other reasons.
Although it is important to examine the ways in which African filmmakers can globalize their work and make enough money to sustain their film careers, it is imperative to examine the ways in which filmmakers are serving local audiences���the very people these films talk about.
Just like there has been a linguistic hierarchy in many postcolonial African countries which elevate languages like English, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic over indigenous African languages, there seems to be a hierarchy in the Ghanaian film industry where indigenous film industries like Kumawood and the Dagbanli film industry are constantly demonized for poor video quality, their juju themes, focus on village life and their general disinterest in the affairs of the elite class.
This among other reasons is why it has been refreshing to see a Ghanaian movie explore the important topics of child marriage, poverty, child trafficking, rural-urban migration and the kayayo while centering the language and culture of a historically marginalized ethnicity and region in Ghana: the Dagbamba.
Asana Alhassan, in her debut role, gives a riveting performance and her proficiency in Dagbanli is refreshing to witness. Beyond Alhassan, a few popular actors in the Dagbanli film industry are featured in the film; Sherifatu Issah (the first female director in the Dagbanli film industry) and Sagani who gave an incredible performance in Leonard Kubaloe���s Pieli (a seasonal movie in Dagbanli) a few years ago. Pieli follows the life of Katari who embarks on an ancestral journey of self-discovery. (Sidenote: Sagani is my cousin on my father���s side of the family.)
Yet despite these successes, there are several major problems with the film. Despite attempts to include a handful of actors from the Dagbanli film industry to serve as supporting cast in the film, Kwabena Gyansah, the director, did a great disservice to the Dagbamba and Dagbanli speakers by casting actors who neither speak nor understand the language. With their unbearably unintelligible cringe-worthy accents and general inability to pronounce words that would easily roll off my 4-year-old nephew, Tiehisuma���s tongue, the lead actors Adjetey Anang and Akorfa Edjeani (popular Ghallywood actors), no matter how much they try, cannot capture the essence of the Dagbanli language.
For many Dagbanli speakers, this film is painful to watch as they are forced to witness the butchering of one of the languages with the most speakers in the country. This matter could have been easily addressed if Gyansah and the team had cast actors in the decades old Dagbanli film industry in lead roles.
Beyond the casting and desecration of language, some of the story could have been historically true to Zebilla with the representation of indigenous languages like Kusaal (the dominant language), Mampruli and Busanga, which are all spoken there. While the film was set in Zebilla, it did not capture the history, present and linguistic essence of the town. By not addressing this, the filmmaker and his team used a nationally marginalized language and ethnicity to erase an even more marginalized language and ethnicity, when both could have been adequately represented. Alternatively, the film could have been set in a Dagbanli-speaking community like Zabzu��u, Tampi��, Gushe��u, or Pa��azaa.
In addition to representation, the production team could have made the film more accessible to not just Ghanaians but the regions the film was set in. A series of screenings in Zebilla, Tamale and other Northern Ghanaian towns and villages would have made it accessible to local audiences, many of whom do not have Netflix accounts or alternative means to stream the film online.
Consulting extensively with stakeholders in the Dagbanli film industry like filmmakers, directors, actors, and scholars would have helped address some of the issues that many of us would consider quite obvious to anyone familiar with the region. In my larger dissertation project, which is the first ever scholarly work on the industry, I map the relationship between the Dagbanli film industry and indigenous knowledge systems in Ghana. This is an important resource for understanding the film landscape in the Northern Region.
Overall, this was a good film but let���s hope that next time, the production team makes an even better film by doing extensive research and also consulting with stakeholders and experts in the Dagbanli film industry.
June 14, 2020
Can a virus accelerate change in Africa?
Cuban Health Specialists arrive in South Africa to support efforts to curb the spread of COVID-19. Image credit Gov. of South Africa via Flickr CC.
African intellectuals are calling for a different discussion about how to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Isn���t this the right time to propel changes that have often been postponed? African leaders fall easily into response mode, not to the crises they face but to the advice they receive. Perhaps COVID-19 can herald structural transformation in the continent. Admitting this is too good a crisis to be allowed to go to waste, here are five reasons to use it to shift gears.
First, the China-US trade war that introduced turbulence in the world markets, followed by the Saudi Arabia-Russia oil prices war have foreshown that the 2011 end of the commodity super cycle could get much worse than predicted. With historical lows for Brent oil prices and US oil futures plunging below zero for the first time in history in April, there is little doubt left about the volatility of a commodity that represents 40% of African exports. Since 2007, the volume of Africa���s crude petroleum exports to the world has decreased sharply. China���s imports are shrinking, following decreases in exports to the US and others. With 7.5% of world oil reserves and 7.1% of gas reserves Africa will never be a big player capable of determining prices or occupy a premium place in this market. COVID-19 has driven this message home. Since 2007, the volume of Africa���s crude petroleum exports to the world has decreased sharply. China���s imports are shrinking, following decreases in exports to the US and others.
The prices of renewable energy production, on the other hand, are becoming more competitive by the day, often surpassing the fossil fuels matrices. This makes it the right time to shift towards a cleaner, low-carbon production and consumption base. Africa has the luxury of being able to accelerate its industrialization with greener solutions both in terms of energy and sustainable infrastructure. Extremely low prices for oil and coal (associated with depressed demand in some countries) translate into a unique chance to get rid of heavily subsidized fossil fuel consumption and the option to dismantle the byzantine tax systems plugged into the fuel in the pump.
Second, although not as dramatic as the fall of the oil and gas prices, the other commodities composing the bulk of African exports, be it metals and extractives or agricultural-related and fisheries, usually exposed to high levels of volatility, have all been driven south by COVID-19. Africa has 35 out its 54 countries in the highly export-commodity-dependent category (referring to countries with 80% or higher dependency). This colonial characteristic is responsible today for rent-seeking behavior and lazy domestic taxation efforts. COVID-19 has demonstrated the fragility of the African growth trajectory when a combination of low demand, low prices and limited fiscal space meet any economic storm, even more so with a perfect storm. COVID-19 sends a powerful message to African leaders: they need to adjust to a new normal.
With regard to food security, Africa is home to over 874 million hectares of land suitable for agricultural production. With less than 10% per cent of arable land currently being used for food production, there are windows of opportunities to expand this to increase local production of crops. Only 6% of the arable land in Africa is irrigated, yet the continent has the potential to irrigate nearly 40 million ha (10%), doubling agricultural productivity.
Looking at the potential offered by the establishment of the African Continental Free-Trade Area, the largest such endeavor by a number of countries and populations covered, there is an option to use smart protectionism to boost intra-African value-added tradable products. This is an opportunity to transform, starting with the immediate need for alternative food supplies provoked by the COVID-19 disruption of the existing value and supply chains. Time for love thy neighbor.
Third,��the restrictions recently introduced by the US and European countries for exports of vital medicines, reagents, respiratory or personal protective equipment affect African countries heavily. It is a wake-up call to think about how the continent should deal with pharmaceutical regulation, health-related procurement and manufacture of medicines and products in areas that are critical for disease control and protect well-being.
Africa carries 25% of the world���s disease burden but accounts for less than 1% of global health expenditure. It manufactures less than 2% of the medicines it consumes. Over two-thirds of the world���s HIV cases and 93% of the deaths due to malaria currently occur in Africa. In addition, the continent bears 40% of the global deaths of children under five-years old, mainly due to neonatal causes as well as pneumonia, diarrhea, measles, HIV, tuberculosis and malaria. The tragedy is that these diseases are treatable: most related deaths could be prevented with timely access to appropriate and affordable medicines.
Africa���s capacity for pharmaceutical research and development (R&D) and local drug production is amongst the lowest in the world. Overall, 37 African countries have some pharmaceutical production, although only South Africa produces some active pharmaceutical ingredients. Where there is local production in Africa, normally there is a reliance on imported active ingredients. As a result, the supply of African pharmaceuticals remains highly dependent on foreign funding and imports. The production of health equipment and consumables follows a similar pattern.
COVID-19 has demonstrated a hidden capacity to produce masks, tests and other essentials throughout Africa. This capacity should be nurtured. This is the beginning of a shift towards greater reliance on African-produced health products, coupled with investments in R&D.
Fourth, Africa must get readier for the impact of new technologies in the world of work and production systems. After being praised for their leadership in mobile banking transactions, Africans should embrace more ambitious goals. Instead of perceiving technological advancements as threats, Africans can emulate the mobile banking experience to leapfrog infrastructure shortcomings as well as surpass outmoded bureaucratic processes that are hampering entrepreneurship and formalization of the economy. Without more modern forms of economic transaction, it will not be possible to significantly increase fiscal pressure in the continent���currently averaging 17% of GDP, against a world average of 35%. Such low pressure reduces fiscal space and exacerbates various forms of external dependency.
Fortunately, some of the best reformers in the World Bank���s Ease of Doing Business Index are African. The same impetus is needed for innovation. Africa���s industrialization and services transformation depends greatly on the continent���s capacity to tap into its position as the largest reservoir of digital natives. With the youngest population in the world it is in Africa that new technologies have the highest potential to adapt, provided they are not limited to being passive consumers of content and systems but rather participants as well. COVID-19 has contributed to the discovery of this potential. With 53 out of 54 countries closing their school system, countries struggled to not let an entire school year go bust. There is a realization digital platform usage can be accelerated for educational purposes. The same is true for services. Remote forms of work have now become increasingly popular and socially accepted. This is a chance to accelerate transformation and leapfrog.
Fifth, macroeconomic stability rules continue to be challenged across the globe. With the recession or depression distress signals becoming louder the monetarist orthodoxy of Milton Friedman is evaporating fast. The State is back, to salvage the market���s biggest disruption since the Great Depression. However, the small margin of manoeuver resulting from the instability prevailing since the 2008-09 subprime crisis does not allow recourse to the usual recipes. Enormous stimulus packages, shooting debt to GDP ratios way above 100%, deeply negative interest rates or monetized fiscal deficits have become acceptable policy. Economic neoclassical theory is turning on its head.
With stagflation or deflation replacing inflation worries, access to the printing machine is the new normal for those who can afford. With the current way debt is classified and its sustainability framework applied, African countries will never be able to get out of COVID-19���s long-lasting impact. Most of the reforms made in the last two decades in the continent, producing exceptional growth performance for about half of the countries, are seriously compromised. Calls for debt relief���or more timid debt service moratorium���are drops in the ocean. Something much more ambitious and radical should be envisaged. This crisis allows us to think big, and offers Africa an opportunity to exercise agency and embark on a more robust structural transformation process. Building on the gains of the last few years and the resilience of its population, there will probably be no better time to fast-track change.
June 12, 2020
Reading List: Cara Moyer-Duncan
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Now that the longest semester in my more than a decade of teaching has concluded (thank you COVID-19) and I have a little more time to read (when my six year old will let me), I am catching up on recent books that focus on culture, identity, race and nation, much like my own book, Projecting Nation: South African Cinemas after 1994.
Media in Postapartheid South Africa: Postcolonial Politics in the Age of Globalization by AIAC���s own Sean Jacobs is an engaging read that gives astute insight into two decades of democracy through a range of ���media events.��� Jacobs argues that in the years following the transition to democracy, ���popular media, corporate interests and national political agendas aligned together to construct a mostly neoliberal, uncritically capitalist and consumerist vision of South African social life.��� This includes the media spectacles surrounding/following Nelson Mandela���s release from prison, especially his appearance at the 1995 Rugby World Cup, and media coverage of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Government political programs and elite business interests also used the rhetoric of rainbow nation and aspirational politics to imagine ���postracial futures and a globalized South Africa������for example, advertisements for consumer goods such as beer, the global branding of South Africa spearheaded by International Marketing Council of South Africa, and primetime programing for the SABC, the nation���s public broadcaster. However, Jacobs notes that the new democracy also ���created or opened spaces for social movements to shape discourse.��� The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), a group leading the grassroots HIV/AIDS movement, is perhaps most notable in this regard. The TAC used media and new technologies to pioneer ways to compel the South African government to expand access to antiretroviral medications and thus make South Africa a more equitable nation. Others sought to create or reinforce insular spaces, as seen in what Jacobs describes as ���the second Afrikaner state in Cyberspace.���
Kruger National Park (KNP) figures largely in the way South Africa has been and continues to be imagined, both within and beyond the nation���s borders. Jacob S. Dlamini���s recently released Safari Nation: A Social History of the Kruger Park complicates the prevailing understanding of KNP as a place of racial exclusion. Dlamini argues that the focus on black exclusion from the park as a result of colonial and apartheid policies is a mischaracterization. While there were limits in terms of access to rest camps and restaurants, especially during the height of apartheid, from the inception of tourism to the sanctuary, black people were allowed to visit. Dlamini thus focuses on ���histories of presence��� as he offers a fascinating account of black engagement with KNP���as residents, laborers who worked at or moved through the park, poachers and tourists, as well as insights into the contemporary dimensions of this contested space.
In Beneath the Surface: A Transnational History of Skin Lighteners, Lynn M. Thomas documents the contentious and complicated history of skin lighteners, a global commodity promoted through advertising and other forms of mass media during the 20th century. For some, Thomas argues, skin lighteners function as a ���technology of visibility��� in colonial, racist, patriarchal and capitalist contexts as they navigate the various boundaries associated with these oppressive systems. For others, they signify the physical and psychological threat posed by toxic ingredients in these products, and the internalization of dominant standards associated with social, political and cultural conditions. Consequently, the promotion and sale of these products spurred various forms of resistance. This history is largely told from the vantage point of South Africa, but in conversation with developments and practices in other parts of the world, namely the US and East Africa. Thomas explores, with nuance and sensitivity how skin whitening/lightening figured into precolonial concepts of beauty, how these practices took on new forms during the colonial and apartheid eras, and how they endure in a neoliberal democratic South Africa.
I am a Top Chef fanatic, so I eagerly read Kwame Onwuachi���s Notes from a Young Black Chef. Co-written with Joshua David Stein, Onwuachi, who has roots in Louisiana, the Caribbean, and Nigeria, traces his coming of age in New York and Ibusa, and the flavors that animated his early life. Onwuachi documents his rise in the white/male dominated world of haute cuisine, and the racism he experienced in and out of the kitchen, set against the backdrop of Obama���s two terms in office and the election of Trump. Dotted throughout the book are recipes that capture pivotal moments in the formation of his identity. It is not a perfect book. For example, Onwuachi suggests his grandfather, former Howard University professor Patrick Chike Onwuachi, moved back to Nigeria in 1973 after his friend, and the author���s namesake, activist Kwame Ture (aka Stokely Carmichael), was assassinated (that didn���t happen). Nevertheless, Notes from a Young Black Chef is a compelling read as it captures the way Onwuachi uses his food, which defies dominant notions of African American cuisine, to tell his story under the premise that black lives matter.
The other Afropolitans
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr. Image via @moustapha_seye on Twitter.
Born in Senegal in 1990, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr is the winner of the St��phane Hessel Prize for his short story ���La Cale��� (2014), the Ahmadou Kourouma Award and the Grand Prix du Roman M��tis for his novel Terre Ceinte (2015), and the Litt��rature-Monde Prize (2018) for his novel Silence du Coeur. Here Rama Salla Dieng discusses with him his last novel, De Purs Hommes, which explores homosexuality, what it means to be an ���intellectual,��� and what it means to be ���humane.���
Rama Salla Dieng
Does the term ���Afropolitan��� resonate with you, Mbougar?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
If it does, it would be purely at an intellectual level. The notion interests me insofar as it interrogates a tensed identity between at least two poles: one African and the other, generally Western. This is a situation, or a condition close to mine, in appearance. However, when I dig further into the implications of the ���Afropolitan��� concept to consider Taiye Selasie���s meaning, for example, then I would not exactly define myself as such. The understanding that I have of the term is that of a plural identity of course (which is how all identities are), but also a circulatory one, perhaps even claimed in the multiplicity of cultural anchors between which one navigates. My deep cultural roots, even though I now have others that I care about, remain deeply African. As a writer, as a man simply, I have the impression that childhood is fundamental in the substance and texture of the imaginary. My childhood is deeply Senegalese. I feel Senegalese, African, and I know this first identity better. I am happy that it has met other identities, other spaces, and that it has evolved at their contact. But I do not think I���m in a quest for identity. I do not feel this tension. What interests me are the people, how they relate to each other, wherever they come from. What they bring. What they say. Ultimately, this is what reveals the most about them. I find, in my particular case, that ���Afropolitan��� is a pleonasm, a redundancy. I am African, so I am from the whole world, of course. This kind of aesthetics and ethics of the ���here��� and the ���there���, the near and the far away, is right. But I do not want to prove it. I sometimes find it strange that ���the African��� must still have to specify that they are de facto (not always de jure, alas, but it is on this point that one must work) of the world. I question all the suffixes that we associate with ���Afro,��� in general. But I admit that trajectories and experiences differ. I am not unaware of the political balance of power either. One must also have the means to be ���Afropolitan.���
Rama Salla Dieng
Why do you write?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
Dreadful question. Reasons for writing do not always appear clearly to a writer. Let���s also not forget that these reasons may change with time, age, situation ��� But today, I believe that the reasons I have to write are the same as those which make me read: on the one hand, to mitigate temporarily the fundamental loneliness that I believe to be at the heart of our condition; and, on the other hand, to try to go further in understanding human experience in all its forms. But I could, more pithily, say, like Beckett that I am ���only good at that!���
Rama Salla Dieng
Would you say that your location, and your gender have an influence on your artistic choices?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
I cannot be blind to the fact that writing as a black man from France is anything close to writing as a white woman living in Sine-Saloum. To be aware of this configuration, of the place from which one speaks, their positionality, as one says, is important. But that does not mean that I���m forced to do what society, or the air of the times, expect from the ���identity structure��� that is mine. I believe, as a writer, that we must always go to the source of the universal, of what makes us human beings beyond our particularities. But the source of the universal is never more than the bottom of the singularity. It is therefore in this singularity that one must drill to reach it. The work of imagination and fiction allows me to project myself into singularities that are not exactly mine. I put myself in the head of women, in the skin of ���travestis,��� in the heart of bisexual, in the eyes of jihadist executioners. These are points of view from which I seek to uncover only one thing: the human condition.
Rama Salla Dieng
Let���s talk about the human condition that you tell with realism and nuances through the voices of the ragazzi in Silence du Ch��ur. You came to France as a student, what are your thoughts on the rise of university enrollment fees in this country, the surprising decision of England to extend student visas to two years (instead of four months) in the context of Brexit, and the situation of higher education in Senegal?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
There would be so much to say about this rise in registration fees for foreign students (outside the EU) in France! I find it scandalous, discriminatory, cynical, stupid and sad. But it only confirms the terrible and wild power of liberalism, which reigns today at the heart of the public university. All its merit so far was to put knowledge within the reach of all. By this measure, it promotes a differential access to knowledge, an economic inequality, created, thought, wanted, supported by a policy. I find it awful. I have the impression that France sometimes forgets that its influence, its soft-power, also passes through all the students who have been trained in its universities and who promote its training in other countries. Great Britain seems to have understood that foreign students almost always represent an opportunity for the country, whether they stay there or leave after their studies. As for higher education in Senegal, I have long been very critical of it. I still am, but I also understand that it is dragging a structural problem of 30 years. And this problem is simple: teachers can no longer teach; they have almost become social workers. I feel that they are a little left to themselves. And in these conditions, the intellectual stimulation that must be the natural atmosphere of the university does not seem possible to me: teachers and students have their minds elsewhere than to sustaining it, if the very basic material conditions of work are yet to be met.
Rama Salla Dieng
Your first novel, Terre Ceinte, and your last, De Purs Hommes (published in English as Real Men), explore themes that one could call feminist: the right to self-determination, and to individual and sexual freedoms, among other themes. In the first, two young people convicted of adultery and for their political ideas and in the latter, the main characters are worried about their sexual practices and personal convictions. But much more than that, your novels ask the question: ���What is being a human and being humane (beyond our gender)?��� ���What is an intellectual and what are the perils of being one?��� Are you a feminist? Or do you just happen to write feminist novels?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
I think a lot about this question: what is being an intellectual? I do not think, as some people do, that it is an outdated or irrelevant question. There are days when I wonder if a writer can be considered an intellectual. It depends, I think, on the form and the framework of their literary production, the order of their speech, in a way. A writer who writes a novel can make people think about a given issue, but I will not call them intellectual. For me the novel must also be a place of thought, but the thought of the novel is very different from philosophical, sociological, or historical thought, whose canonical form is the essay. But a writer can intervene, outside the novel, in the public debate, by an essay, a tribune, an interview. At that moment, he has intellectual pretensions and he must assume them. All that I am saying here is my very personal definition of the intellectual: any individual who, starting from a discipline or a field of knowledge, participates by writing or orally, within the framework academic or not, to the intelligence of a collective subject. That means three things to me: first, that the word of an intellectual is a little more dense and sought after than a mere weekly market opinion; secondly���it is obvious���that there are as many types of intellectuals and interventions as there are of intellectuals (I refer here to Foucault’s reflections on the question); finally, that the word of an intellectual commits them entirely, and alone, on the path of the search for truth, which is the ultimate goal. The perils that lie from there, are those to which any search for truth exposes: to have adversaries and sometimes enemies, to have some friends but to be most often alone, to doubt, to be denied (but it is not exactly a danger), to be misunderstood. But being ready for all of this is part of the ���courage of truth.���
I’ll be quicker on your second question. Yes, I���m a feminist, that is, I feel (watch out, I���m going to press open doors) that women are human beings in their own right, and as such are entitled to the same dignity, the same freedom, the same rights. This minimal definition of feminism as I see it is found in my novels. I try in any case to put women who have chosen to follow their desire wherever it may lead them. As a writer, my thinking about feminism has been changing. At first, I thought it always meant building positive, almost ideal female characters. This is no longer the case. I think we have to show female characters who are free to go against the ideal figures, who are often ideal figures just as men dream of. I am now trying to paint more complex female figures, more mixed, less stereotyped. I am looking for their deep humanity. It is also that, I believe, to be feminist.
Rama Salla Dieng
What contemporary feminisms inspire you? The notions of masculinity, femininity? Gender?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
The bottom line for me is that these are not dogmatic chapels, or abstract frozen terms behind which there are only theories. I believe that any discourse on gender, whatever its situation, must first start from the real, the real and the experience. This is the only way, in my opinion, we can maintain relevance and vitality in these debates���by accepting that they are complex, not systematically transposable, structural, moving and long to take root in the spirits and imaginations. All these notions (masculinity, femininity, gender), in my opinion, put the issue of identity less at stake than that of power. Is domination (economic, physical, symbolic) exercised over a human being? Is this human being belittled because they are a woman, because they do not correspond to what we expect a man to be, because their sexual orientation is not heterosexual? I think it would be much better to have a more sensitive approach to these issues, starting from vulnerability, or embrittlement. But I���m under the impression that we are sometimes confronted with war-like political speeches and all-encompassing pretensions. It would almost be forgotten that no sensible life corresponds to a slogan. But we live in a time when slogans are more effective than the exploration of a sensitive life.
Rama Salla Dieng
Family and parenthood also occupy a central place in your writings. Is this a fascination for you?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
I do not have children. My thoughts or assumptions about being a parent come mainly from my observations, not from personal experience. I watched my parents very much in the way they had to assume this status. And more generally, through the question of parenthood, it is especially that of the transmission that interests me. I���m not always sure what a parent has to pass on���do the parents themselves really know it? What is the limit between transmitting values and projecting oneself into a being that one can be tempted to educate by thinking not of one���s life, but of the regrets of ours? What freedom is left to the child not to receive our legacy, or to use it against us? The verb ���to reproduce��� is sometimes used. In the literal sense, I find the expression sometimes frightening: Do I want to ���reproduce��� myself? This questions me, although I am convinced that it is an experience that can also be very happy and harmonious.
Rama Salla Dieng
If the chosen themes seem to suggest that you are a writer with (a) cause(s), in your writings you seem to make the choice to let all voices resonate at equal intensity. Without judgement. Are you of those who think that the color of the writer is to have none? Why?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
I will take the excuse of this question to return to the thought of the novel, which I mentioned above. I am a novelist. And for me, a novelist, in their work, must always try to suspend their judgment���especially their moral judgment���which does not mean that they do not have one. But the romantic space must first be an open space, where, hypothetically, all choices are possible. I believe that all the art of the novelist is there, in their capacity to be not necessarily absent, but erased, ambiguous. The fiction must give several tracks, open several paths (through characters, situations, dialogues, reflections), and allow the reader to survey them and make their own idea of things. To questions, the novelist is to be adding more. And, to do so, they must be able to hear forcefully ideas opposed to theirs, which no one, by the way, asks them. I will overturn your proposal: the color of the writer is to be able to have them all. In his work, anyway.
Rama Salla Dieng
Where would you place inner exploration in your academic writings?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
My academic writings are oriented toward literature, or literary theory, more precisely, even if they have a great deal of dialogue with the major disciplines of the human and social sciences. The university does not always allow, except in a few disciplines, the latitude to get involved inward more deeply than the academic rules allow. This is slowly changing, however. I always thought that approaching literature through research was deepening one���s way of reading the texts. Nothing could be more personal. To read a text is to let it unfold several senses within oneself. The polysemy of a text never appears in itself; it always needs a subjectivity that reveals it. Reading and interpreting remain first personal gestures. That���s what I’m trying to put forward, respecting the academic foundation, of course. It���s an equilibrium that���s complicated. But being a novelist, at the same time, helps me a lot in reading other authors. I feel a deeper connivance, I am more attentive to the movements of the writing. Finally, in my own academic writing, I try more and more to be a writer. To have a kind of ���erotic writing��� that simply means this: Do not forget the pleasure of the text, the sensuality of writing, which is a component of the pleasure of knowledge. I���m not sure that was the meaning of your question, but in any case, I interpreted it this way.
Rama Salla Dieng
Which woman has had the most impact on you, and for what reason?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
Simple and classic answer: my mother. We were talking about transmission earlier. She transmitted to me one of her qualities, precious and indispensable when one is a writer: patience. But there is another reason: It is by observing her that I began to have my first reflections on what it meant to be a woman in Senegalese society.
Rama Salla Dieng
If you were a woman, who would you be?
Mohamadou Mbougar Sarr
There are so many of them. I keep most of them secret, out of pure jealousy.
But I gladly cite some, heroines of literature, as writers or characters: Antigone, Ken Bugul, The Marquise de Merteuil, La Grande Royale, Nedjma, Anais Nin, La Sanseverrina, Anna Karenina, Marie-Vieux Chauvet, Foedora de Malicante, Madame de Mortsauf. I would have also loved to be Nina Simone, who is romantic at will. And Toni Morrison, the great and late Toni Morrison who will be missed. And Angela Davis too. If there some small place left, it would be for Suzanne C��saire.
June 11, 2020
Janga la mfumo mpya wa ubepari
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Image credit Ruaraka Social Justice Center.
For English click here.
Agosti 2019, Kituo cha Haki ya Jamii cha Mathare (Mathare Social Justice Centre���MSJC) katika mji mkuu wa Kenya, Nairobi, kilifanya mkutano, ” Mbona Wakenya hawazungumzii juu ya ubepari?” Kituo cha haki cha Jamii cha Mathare ni shirika la msingi wa jamii huko Mathare, ambalo hufanya kampeni juu ya uwajibikaji wa kisiasa na haki ya kijamii na mauaji za kiholela na ukatili wa polisi katika maeneo yenye mapato ya chini ya Eastlands jijini Nairobi. Mkutano huo ilishikiliwa na Kituo hicho, Africa Is a Country na Review Of African Political Economy. Ilifuata kazi iliyofanywa katika ROAPE, Ubepari katika Afrika, iliyohaririwa na mchumi wa kisiasa Jorg Wiegratz. Hapo awali, mnamo Desemba 2018, Jorg Wiegratz alikuwa ameandika katika Africa Is a Country kwamba nchi nyingi za Kiafrika kwa sasa ni majamii za kibepari na kwa uchambuzi tunahitaji kusema haya tunapoandika juu yao. MSJC pia wanakubali, na walipotuandikia walisema “Kenya iko na umaskini, madeni, ukosefu wa ajira, udanganyifu, ufisadi, ghasia za serikali, uhalifu wa maskini wa mijini na kadhalika.��� Katika mijadala ya kitaalam kati ya wasomi nchini Kenya, hakuna maandishi ya uchambuzi juu ya shida ya kibepari nchini na juu ya uchumi wa kisiasa wa kibepari nchini Kenya kwa ujumla. ” Sasa Kituo hiki kimeshirikiana na Africa Is a Country ya kutoa mfululizo���”Ubepari katika Jiji Langu”���ya machapisho na video ili kuandika ubepari wa kila siku jijini Nairobi. Mradi huo unafadhiliwa kupitia Shuttleworth Fellowship���nilipokea fursa kutoka kwao mwaka huu. Kusudi ya “Ubepari katika Jiji Langu” ni “kuchambua ubepari kwa njia ambayo tunaiona kila siku.” Kwa hili tunawafadhili kutoa mafunzo kwa wanaharakati wanane na wanajamii wengine kama waandishi wa habari na wapiga video. Kituo cha Haki ya Jamii kitawapa mafunzo wanaharakati kufanya utafiti na kuripoti ili kutoa nakala nane tayari za kuchapishwa na video nne tayari za kuchapishwa. Mwaka huu watachapisha mfululizo wa nakala na video zitakazopapishwa kwenye Africa Is a Country. Nakala hizo zitachapishwa kwa Kiswahili na Kiingereza. Wahariri wa mradi huo ni wanaharakati wawili wa eneo hilo, Gacheke Gachihi na Lena Anyuolo. Gacheke ni mtetezi wa haki za binadamu. Katika miaka kumi na tano iliyopita amekuwa akihusika kama mwanachama wa Bunge la Mwananchi (Peoples Parliament). Pia yeye ni mratibu wa Kituo cha Haki ya Jamii cha Mathare (MSJC). Lena ni mwandishi na mwanaharakati wa haki za kijamii na Kituo cha haki za Jamii cha Mathare na maktaba ya Ukombozi. Chapisho la kwanza ni ya Gacheke na Lena.
��� Sean Jacobs (Tafsiri na Wangui Kibaki)
Mimi ni Gacheke. Mwaka wa 2017 nilikutana na rafiki yangu Antony Adoyo, ambaye kwa sasa ni mratibu wa jamii na wa utafiti unaoshirikisha wanajamii katika kamati ya uendeshaji wa vituo vya haki ya kijamii, inayoshirikisha sauti za wanaharakati wa jamii mabimbali. Wakati huo alikuwa anajitayarisha kutamatisha masomo yake katika chuo kikuu cha Nairobi, ambapo alikuwa mwanawafuzi wa masomo ya uchumi na fedha.
Adoyo alikuwa na ndoto ya kufanya kazi na Benki Kuu ya Kenya. Ndoto ambayo wanafunzi wenzake pia waliienzi. Walitumaini kuwa watapata kazi yenye mapato mazuri. Tulipokuwa tukijadiliana na Adoyo alinisihi nimsaidie kupata kazi kama mwanaharakati wa haki za binadamu kwenye mashirika makubwa. Nilishangaa kuwa msomi wa chuo kikuu nambari moja nchini Kenya angehitaji msaada wangu kupata kazi ya uharakati.
Adoyo alipohitimu mwaka wa elfu mbili na kumi na saba, alinialika pamoja na rafiki wengine kwenye karamu nyumbani kwao. Aliishi katika nyumba za kukodisha yenye vyumba viwili kule Dandora, mojawapo ya mitaa ya walalahoi ilioko karibu na Mathare. Baba yake aliongoza dua ya kumwomba Mwenyezi Mungu amsadie mwanawe kuleta matumaini na kuiondoa familia yake kwenye umaskini na taabu za Dandora. Tulisherehekea mlo wa chapati kwa nyama. Niliona jinsi familia hii iliyojikakamua kumsomesha mwanao ili aweze kuwaokoa kutoka umaskini.
Wanafunzi wengi hawatakua na uwezo wa kutoa familia zao katika umaskini ama kulipa mikopo ambayo wazazi wao walichukua mradi walipe karo ya chuo kikuu. Ni swala la haki ya kijamii kuwa wanafunzi wengi waliohitimu, wana shahada mbalimbali za uguuzi, kama za udaktari, uchumi, uhandisi na bioteknolojia. Shahada hizi zinawapa taswira ya waliopitia kwa miaka kuhitimu. Ukakamavu unaolipizwa na ukosefu wa kazi kwa miaka mitano baadaye na mingine. Wanaishi katika janga la ubepari kila siku.
Mwanafunzi mmoja wa masomo ya ujamaa aliilalamikia kuwa ameacha kuomba kazi akihofia kuwa huenda akapatana mchuuzi akitumia stakabadhi zake kufunga karanga. Alikuwa ametuma maombi yanayozidi mia na alishuku kuwa stakabadhi hizo zinatupwa kisha wachuuzi wanazitumia kufunga bidhaa vyao.
Mimi ni Lena. Nimefanya vibarua vingi wakati wa likizo za chuo kikuu. Nimetumwa kwenye maskani ya walalahai kupeleka maua yenye maelfu ilhali nalipwa shilingi mia tano tu kwa siku. Pesa hizi ziliishia kwenye nauli na mlo. Kama mhudumu wa mkahawa wa matajiri nililipwa shilingi sitini kwa saa, nilifanya kazi siku sita kila wiki nikisimama kwa saa nyingi kuuzia wanunuzi chakula ambacho siwezi kumudu. Kazi yangu ilizalisha mkahawa maelfu mia. Wengi wa wahudumu wenzangu walikuwa wanafunzi waliohitimu wanaofanya kazi kama watumwa na hawawezi ondoka kwa sababu hawana dhamana kuwa watapata kazi nyingine. Wanajua pia kuna wengi kama wao ambao wanatafuta kazi na watakubali hata nusu ya mshahara yao.
Mama Victor ambaye pia ni mwanakamati wa kamati ya uendeshaji wa vituo vya haki ya kijamii na mratibu wa mama za shirika wahasiriwa na walionusurika (wa ukatili wa polisi na mauaji yasiyo ya haki), alikuwa mjakazi kwa miaka sita katika mtaa wa Eastleigh, makao ya wafanya kazi wa asilia ya KiSomali inayopakana na Mathare. Wanawake wengi wajakazi hutoka Mathare, Kiamaiko, Kariobangi, Korogocho, Kiambiu na mitaa mingine ya walalahoi. Wao huenda Eastleigh kila siku wakiwa na njaa ya kupata angalau shilingi mia moja baada ya kufua kwa muda wa saa tatu ama hata kuosha vyombo na kupewa kati shilingi ishirini na hamsini. Kwa wastani, mwanamke mmoja hulipwa shilingi mia mbili.
Kuna ushindani kutoka kwa waKaramajong na Gisu waliohamia kutoka Uganda ambao wanalipwa elfu mbili au tatu kwa mwezi katika kazi ambayo wengi hulipwa elfu tano. Hii inafanya hali ya kusihi kuwa mbaya zaidi. Kutumia shilingi elfu tano ni ngumu, maana kodi ya nyumba ni shilingi elfu tatu na elfu nyingine mbili ni ya kulisha na kuvisha familia. Hali ya Kufanya kazi pia ni mbaya. Wanawake hawa wananyanyswa na kubakwa. Umaskini ni ukatili. Ni mapambano ya ya watu wanaong���ang���ana kuishi katika hali duni.
Tulipo jadiliana na rafiki zetu wengine tulijulishwa kuhusu hali nyingine duni wa wafanyi kazi wa viwandani, sana sana wanawake, wanaofanya kazi kwenye mashamba ya maua, kampuni ambazo zinasafirisha maua na mboga ambavyo vinakandamiza wafanyikazi. Kampuni hizi zina mitambo ya kuchunguza wafanyikazi kwa kutumia alama ya vidole kuhakisha kuwa wameigia saa tatu na dakika ishirini na tisa, asubuhi na kuondoka saa kumi na dakika ishirini na tisa jioni. Kuchelewa hata kwa dakika moja husababisha mkato wa mshahara ambao ni shilingi mia sita sitini na tatu kwa siku. Saa za ziada hazilipiwi. Nchi za ulaya zikihitaji maua nyingi misimu fulani wao hufanya kazi kwa saa ziada kwenye baridi nyingi. Sekta hii ilipata shilingi billioni 153 mwaka wa 2018, ilhali wafanyi kazi hawa wanashinda kwenye baridi bila vifaa wala nguo za kuwakinga. Mfanyikazi mgonjwa hufutwa kazi badala ya kampuni kusimamia matibabu yake. Wakuu wao hufungua akaunti bila idhini ya wafanyikazi, maana wana nambari zao za siri. Sababu ya hii, wanaweza kutoa fedha zao wanavyotaka.
Katiba mpya ya Kenya (2010) na sheria za uhusiano wa kazi 2007 inawapa wafanyikazi haki ya kujiiunga na jumuiya. Kampuni hizi wanawachuguza wafanyikazi, na yeyote anayehusika na jumuiya hufutwa. Majumuia yaliyoko pia yanawakandamiza kwa kuwalipisha ada ila hawajatia bidii katika kuimarisha hali ya wafanyakazi. Wanaendeleza ukatili wa makampuni, serikali na wamiliki nyumba wanaowakandamiza wafanyikazi zaidi kwa kunyonya mapato yao madogo.
Mizizi hii ni ya historia kutoka miaka ya kenda mia na themanini wakati Benki ya Walimwengu na mfuko wa fedha wa kimataifa walilazimisha sera za marekebisho kwenye nchi za KiAfrika, Asia na nyingine kama Kenya. Wakati huo, serikali ya ukoloni ililazimishwa kukatiza uwekezaji katika sekta ya afya, maskani, masomo na kilimo mradi ili wapebari wapate hali nzuri ya kunyonya na kupata faida kutoka kwa huduma hizi ambazo zinafaa kupewa kila mwananchi. Hali hii imekuwa mbaya zaidi msimu huu wa virusi vya korona.
Tunaendelea kupambana na ukandamizaji wa serikali, ukatili na dhuluma za mfumo wa upebari yenye itikadi ya chuki kwa maskini na uchoyo wa faida. Urafiki wetu na Adoyo ulizalisha maandalizi ya masomo ya siasa pamoja na wanafunzi wengine waliohitimu. Kuna shirika la wanafunzi ambalo limeanzisha mafunzo katika mitaa mbalimbali ili watu wapate fahamu ya janga hili la mfumo mpya wa ubepari. Kupitia kwa shirika la wanawake katika vituo vya haki ya kijamii, tunaungana kupambana na unyanyasaji wa wajakazi, ubakaji na unyanyasaji wa kijinsia. Maktaba ya Ukombozi inaunganisha vituo vya haki ya kijamii na wanafunzi wa vyuo vikuu kwa nia ya kuweka pamoja juhudi zetu na kupambana na ukandamizaji wa serikali, ukatili wa polisi katika vyuo vikuu na ukosefu wa kazi.
Kuunganisha juhudi zetu kati ya wanafunzi na wafanyikazi kunasaidia kutengeneza njia mbadala ya siasa na kutia nguvu muungano wa wanaharakati wa haki ya kijamii kupigania uhuru wa kutoka kwa maisha duni ya ubepari.
Taswira fupi ya hali ya wavujajasho jijini Nairobi:
Jackson: Mlinzi /Bawabu
Mkataba: Nilitia sahihi kwenye mkataba kati yangu na kampuni iliyonipa kazi. Inaeleza namna malipo na jinsi kazi inaweza kukatizwa kutoka pande zote mbili. Ina kanuni za kazi. Nafaya kazi siku saba za wiki kutoka saa kumi na moja asubuhi hadi saa kumi na moja jioni wakati huu ambao matembezi yanachunguzwa. Kazi yangu ni kulinda lango na kusahihisha wageni wanaoingia na kutoka.
Hongo: Sikutozwa. Nilisikia kutoka kwa rafiki yangu kwamba kuna kampuni inayotafuta walinzi wa maeneo ya biashara.
Malipo: Nalipwa shilingi elfu kumi na tano kwa mwezi.
Njia ya malipo: Amana kwenye benki
Umbali kutoka kazini: Kutoka Kawangware hadi Kilimani ninakofanya kazi ni kilomita tatu. Natembea nikielekea kazini.
Likizo ya mgonjwa: Kulingana na mkataba, kuna likizo kila mwaka lakini ni vigumu sana siku nzima ya likizo. Lazima nilete noti ya daktari, ila hata hivyo kuna uwezo wa wao kukataa kuniruhusu hata siku moja tu ya likizo. Ni kujikakamua uje kazini ukiwa mgonjwa ama upoteze kazi yako.
Likizo ya uzazi: Hakuna likizo ya uzazi. Wajawazito hawawezi kufanya hii kazi. Ni ngumu. Utajihizulu ama ufutwe.
Fidia: Hakuna. Kuna bima ya matibabu ambayo tunalipia shilingi mia tano kwa kila wakati unapoenda naani hospitali ya kibinafsi. Madaktari pia wanaomba hongo kwa usaidizi wa kupata siku ya likizo.
Athari za kazini: Walevi au wajeuri waweza kusababisha uhamishwe kwenda mbali na nyumbani ama ufutwe kazi. Jumba likivamiwa hatuna namna au vifaa vya kujikinga, pamoja na wale walio ndani.
Mama Victor: Mjakaz
Mkataba: Nafanya kazi ya kufua kutoka jumatatu hadi jumamosi, kutoka saa mbili asubuhi hadi saa kumi na moja jioni.
Hongo: Wakati mwengine unaandikwa kazi kupitia mkandarasi. Kazi inayolipa shilingi elfu tano inabidi umpatie mkandarasi elfu moja kwa kupewa kazi.
Unafanya kazi kwa siku ngapi ya wiki au mwezi: Nilifanya kazi kwa siku tano kwa wiki. Wakati mwingine, siku ya jumamosi kutoka asubuhi hadi mchana kwa shilingi 200.
Malipo Wastani: Shilingi 200 kwa siku.
Njia ya malipo: Pesa taslimu.
Umbali kutoka kazini: Kutoka Mathare 4B(nyumbani) hadi Eastleigh (kazini) ni kama kilomita tatu hivi.
Likizo ya mgonjwa: Hakuna likizo ukiugua. Ukiugua kazini utalazimishwa kumaliza kabla ya kuondoka. Wengine hawajali ikiwa unaugua.
Likizo ya uzazi: Hakuna.
Fidia: Hakuna. Waajiri wengine hukupeleka hospitali na kukuacha huko bila kulipia matibabu.
Athari za kazi: Mashidano kutoka kwa waliohamia nchini Uganda.WaKaramajong na Gisu wanakubali kati ya shilingi elfu mbili na elfu tatu. Ni vigumu kujadiliana ili upate angalau shilingi elfu tano kwa mwezi. Tunapitia unyanyasaji wa kijinsia, na kushambuliwa pia.
Gacheke Gachihi ni mtatibu wa kituo cha haki ya kijamii ya Mathare na mwanakamati wa kamati ya uendeshaji wa vituo vya haki ya haki ya kijamii Nairobi, Kenya.
Lena Anyuolo ni mwanachama wa maktaba ya Ukombozi na Kituo Cha Haki ya Kijamii ya Mathare.Yeye ni mwanaharakati wa haki ya kijamii na mwandishi Nairobi, Kenya.
Janga la Uvujaji na Uvunaji Jasho katika Mfumo Mpya Wa Ubepari nchini Kenya
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Image credit Ruaraka Social Justice Center.
In August 2019, the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Kenya���s capital city, Nairobi, held a gathering, “Why don���t Kenyan talk about capitalism?” Mathare Social Justice Centre is a community based organization in Mathare that conducts campaigns on political accountability and social justice and documents cases of extrajudicial killings and police brutality in the low-income areas of Eastlands in Nairobi. The event was co-hosted by the Centre, Africa Is a Country and the Review of African Political Economy. It drew on the work done in the ROAPE series, Capitalism in Africa, edited by political economist Jorg Wiegratz. Earlier, in December 2018, Jorg Wiegratz had written in Africa Is a Country that many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such when we talk about or write about them. And as the Centre wrote to us, ���Kenya is deep in neoliberalism, characterized by high public and private debt, poverty, inequality, unemployment, stress, fraud, corruption, state violence, the criminalization of urban poor etc. In academic debates among scholars in Kenya, there is no analytical writing on the capitalist crisis in the country and on the capitalist political economy in Kenya generally.��� Now the Centre has partnered with Africa Is a Country to produce a series������Capitalism in My City������of posts and videos to document everyday capitalism in Nairobi. The project is funded via a Fellowship I received from the Shuttleworth Fellowship. The aim with ���Capitalism in My City��� is to ������ analyze capitalism in the manner with which we interact and observe it as opposed to a very academic approach of analysis.��� For this we are funding them to train eight local activists and other community members as journalists and videographers. The Social Justice Centre will train the activists to do research and reporting to produce eight publication-ready articles and four publication-ready videos. Over the next year they will publish a series of articles and videos to be published on Africa Is a Country. The articles will be published in Swahili and English. The editors of the project are two local activists, Gacheke Gachihi and Lena Anyuolo. Gacheke is a social justice and human rights advocate. Over the last fifteen years he has been involved in community organizing in Kenya. He is a member of Bunge la Mwananchi (the Peoples Parliament) which is an organic grassroots based social movement, and is also the coordinator for Mathare Social Justice Centre. Lena is a writer and social justice activist with Mathare Social Justice Centre and Ukombozi library. The first post is by Gacheke and Lena.
��� Sean Jacobs (Editor, Africa Is a Country).
For English click here.
Mimi ni Gacheke. Mwaka wa 2017 nilikutana na rafiki yangu Antony Adoyo, ambaye kwa sasa ni mratibu wa jamii na wa utafiti unaoshirikisha wanajamii katika kamati ya uendeshaji wa vituo vya haki ya kijamii, inayoshirikisha sauti za wanaharakati wa jamii mabimbali. Wakati huo alikuwa anajitayarisha kutamatisha masomo yake katika chuo kikuu cha Nairobi, ambapo alikuwa mwanawafuzi wa masomo ya uchumi na fedha.
Adoyo alikuwa na ndoto ya kufanya kazi na Benki Kuu ya Kenya. Ndoto ambayo wanafunzi wenzake pia waliienzi. Walitumaini kuwa watapata kazi yenye mapato mazuri. Tulipokuwa tukijadiliana na Adoyo alinisihi nimsaidie kupata kazi kama mwanaharakati wa haki za binadamu kwenye mashirika makubwa. Nilishangaa kuwa msomi wa chuo kikuu nambari moja nchini Kenya angehitaji msaada wangu kupata kazi ya uharakati.
Adoyo alipohitimu mwaka wa elfu mbili na kumi na saba, alinialika pamoja na rafiki wengine kwenye karamu nyumbani kwao. Aliishi katika nyumba za kukodisha yenye vyumba viwili kule Dandora, mojawapo ya mitaa ya walalahoi ilioko karibu na Mathare. Baba yake aliongoza dua ya kumwomba Mwenyezi Mungu amsadie mwanawe kuleta matumaini na kuiondoa familia yake kwenye umaskini na taabu za Dandora. Tulisherehekea mlo wa chapati kwa nyama. Niliona jinsi familia hii iliyojikakamua kumsomesha mwanao ili aweze kuwaokoa kutoka umaskini.
Wanafunzi wengi hawatakua na uwezo wa kutoa familia zao katika umaskini ama kulipa mikopo ambayo wazazi wao walichukua mradi walipe karo ya chuo kikuu. Ni swala la haki ya kijamii kuwa wanafunzi wengi waliohitimu, wana shahada mbalimbali za uguuzi, kama za udaktari, uchumi, uhandisi na bioteknolojia. Shahada hizi zinawapa taswira ya waliopitia kwa miaka kuhitimu. Ukakamavu unaolipizwa na ukosefu wa kazi kwa miaka mitano baadaye na mingine. Wanaishi katika janga la ubepari kila siku.
Mwanafunzi mmoja wa masomo ya ujamaa aliilalamikia kuwa ameacha kuomba kazi akihofia kuwa huenda akapatana mchuuzi akitumia stakabadhi zake kufunga karanga. Alikuwa ametuma maombi yanayozidi mia na alishuku kuwa stakabadhi hizo zinatupwa kisha wachuuzi wanazitumia kufunga bidhaa vyao.
Mimi ni Lena. Nimefanya vibarua vingi wakati wa likizo za chuo kikuu. Nimetumwa kwenye maskani ya walalahai kupeleka maua yenye maelfu ilhali nalipwa shilingi mia tano tu kwa siku. Pesa hizi ziliishia kwenye nauli na mlo. Kama mhudumu wa mkahawa wa matajiri nililipwa shilingi sitini kwa saa, nilifanya kazi siku sita kila wiki nikisimama kwa saa nyingi kuuzia wanunuzi chakula ambacho siwezi kumudu. Kazi yangu ilizalisha mkahawa maelfu mia. Wengi wa wahudumu wenzangu walikuwa wanafunzi waliohitimu wanaofanya kazi kama watumwa na hawawezi ondoka kwa sababu hawana dhamana kuwa watapata kazi nyingine. Wanajua pia kuna wengi kama wao ambao wanatafuta kazi na watakubali hata nusu ya mshahara yao.
Mama Victor ambaye pia ni mwanakamati wa kamati ya uendeshaji wa vituo vya haki ya kijamii na mratibu wa mama za shirika wahasiriwa na walionusurika (wa ukatili wa polisi na mauaji yasiyo ya haki), alikuwa mjakazi kwa miaka sita katika mtaa wa Eastleigh, makao ya wafanya kazi wa asilia ya KiSomali inayopakana na Mathare. Wanawake wengi wajakazi hutoka Mathare, Kiamaiko, Kariobangi, Korogocho, Kiambiu na mitaa mingine ya walalahoi. Wao huenda Eastleigh kila siku wakiwa na njaa ya kupata angalau shilingi mia moja baada ya kufua kwa muda wa saa tatu ama hata kuosha vyombo na kupewa kati shilingi ishirini na hamsini. Kwa wastani, mwanamke mmoja hulipwa shilingi mia mbili.
Kuna ushindani kutoka kwa waKaramajong na Gisu waliohamia kutoka Uganda ambao wanalipwa elfu mbili au tatu kwa mwezi katika kazi ambayo wengi hulipwa elfu tano. Hii inafanya hali ya kusihi kuwa mbaya zaidi. Kutumia shilingi elfu tano ni ngumu, maana kodi ya nyumba ni shilingi elfu tatu na elfu nyingine mbili ni ya kulisha na kuvisha familia. Hali ya Kufanya kazi pia ni mbaya. Wanawake hawa wananyanyswa na kubakwa. Umaskini ni ukatili. Ni mapambano ya ya watu wanaong���ang���ana kuishi katika hali duni.
Tulipo jadiliana na rafiki zetu wengine tulijulishwa kuhusu hali nyingine duni wa wafanyi kazi wa viwandani, sana sana wanawake, wanaofanya kazi kwenye mashamba ya maua, kampuni ambazo zinasafirisha maua na mboga ambavyo vinakandamiza wafanyikazi. Kampuni hizi zina mitambo ya kuchunguza wafanyikazi kwa kutumia alama ya vidole kuhakisha kuwa wameigia saa tatu na dakika ishirini na tisa, asubuhi na kuondoka saa kumi na dakika ishirini na tisa jioni. Kuchelewa hata kwa dakika moja husababisha mkato wa mshahara ambao ni shilingi mia sita sitini na tatu kwa siku. Saa za ziada hazilipiwi. Nchi za ulaya zikihitaji maua nyingi misimu fulani wao hufanya kazi kwa saa ziada kwenye baridi nyingi. Sekta hii ilipata shilingi billioni 153 mwaka wa 2018, ilhali wafanyi kazi hawa wanashinda kwenye baridi bila vifaa wala nguo za kuwakinga. Mfanyikazi mgonjwa hufutwa kazi badala ya kampuni kusimamia matibabu yake. Wakuu wao hufungua akaunti bila idhini ya wafanyikazi, maana wana nambari zao za siri. Sababu ya hii, wanaweza kutoa fedha zao wanavyotaka.
Katiba mpya ya Kenya (2010) na sheria za uhusiano wa kazi 2007 inawapa wafanyikazi haki ya kujiiunga na jumuiya. Kampuni hizi wanawachuguza wafanyikazi, na yeyote anayehusika na jumuiya hufutwa. Majumuia yaliyoko pia yanawakandamiza kwa kuwalipisha ada ila hawajatia bidii katika kuimarisha hali ya wafanyakazi. Wanaendeleza ukatili wa makampuni, serikali na wamiliki nyumba wanaowakandamiza wafanyikazi zaidi kwa kunyonya mapato yao madogo.
Mizizi hii ni ya historia kutoka miaka ya kenda mia na themanini wakati Benki ya Walimwengu na mfuko wa fedha wa kimataifa walilazimisha sera za marekebisho kwenye nchi za KiAfrika, Asia na nyingine kama Kenya. Wakati huo, serikali ya ukoloni ililazimishwa kukatiza uwekezaji katika sekta ya afya, maskani, masomo na kilimo mradi ili wapebari wapate hali nzuri ya kunyonya na kupata faida kutoka kwa huduma hizi ambazo zinafaa kupewa kila mwananchi. Hali hii imekuwa mbaya zaidi msimu huu wa virusi vya korona.
Tunaendelea kupambana na ukandamizaji wa serikali, ukatili na dhuluma za mfumo wa upebari yenye itikadi ya chuki kwa maskini na uchoyo wa faida. Urafiki wetu na Adoyo ulizalisha maandalizi ya masomo ya siasa pamoja na wanafunzi wengine waliohitimu. Kuna shirika la wanafunzi ambalo limeanzisha mafunzo katika mitaa mbalimbali ili watu wapate fahamu ya janga hili la mfumo mpya wa ubepari. Kupitia kwa shirika la wanawake katika vituo vya haki ya kijamii, tunaungana kupambana na unyanyasaji wa wajakazi, ubakaji na unyanyasaji wa kijinsia. Maktaba ya Ukombozi inaunganisha vituo vya haki ya kijamii na wanafunzi wa vyuo vikuu kwa nia ya kuweka pamoja juhudi zetu na kupambana na ukandamizaji wa serikali, ukatili wa polisi katika vyuo vikuu na ukosefu wa kazi.
Kuunganisha juhudi zetu kati ya wanafunzi na wafanyikazi kunasaidia kutengeneza njia mbadala ya siasa na kutia nguvu muungano wa wanaharakati wa haki ya kijamii kupigania uhuru wa kutoka kwa maisha duni ya ubepari.
Taswira fupi ya hali ya wavujajasho jijini Nairobi
Jackson: Mlinzi /Bawabu
Mkataba: Nilitia sahihi kwenye mkataba kati yangu na kampuni iliyonipa kazi. Inaeleza namna malipo na jinsi kazi inaweza kukatizwa kutoka pande zote mbili. Ina kanuni za kazi. Nafaya kazi siku saba za wiki kutoka saa kumi na moja asubuhi hadi saa kumi na moja jioni wakati huu ambao matembezi yanachunguzwa. Kazi yangu ni kulinda lango na kusahihisha wageni wanaoingia na kutoka.
Hongo: Sikutozwa. Nilisikia kutoka kwa rafiki yangu kwamba kuna kampuni inayotafuta walinzi wa maeneo ya biashara.
Malipo: Nalipwa shilingi elfu kumi na tano kwa mwezi.
Njia ya malipo: Amana kwenye benki
Umbali kutoka kazini: Kutoka Kawangware hadi Kilimani ninakofanya kazi ni kilomita tatu. Natembea nikielekea kazini.
Likizo ya mgonjwa: Kulingana na mkataba, kuna likizo kila mwaka lakini ni vigumu sana siku nzima ya likizo. Lazima nilete noti ya daktari, ila hata hivyo kuna uwezo wa wao kukataa kuniruhusu hata siku moja tu ya likizo. Ni kujikakamua uje kazini ukiwa mgonjwa ama upoteze kazi yako.
Likizo ya uzazi: Hakuna likizo ya uzazi. Wajawazito hawawezi kufanya hii kazi. Ni ngumu. Utajihizulu ama ufutwe.
Fidia: Hakuna. Kuna bima ya matibabu ambayo tunalipia shilingi mia tano kwa kila wakati unapoenda naani hospitali ya kibinafsi. Madaktari pia wanaomba hongo kwa usaidizi wa kupata siku ya likizo.
Athari za kazini: Walevi au wajeuri waweza kusababisha uhamishwe kwenda mbali na nyumbani ama ufutwe kazi. Jumba likivamiwa hatuna namna au vifaa vya kujikinga, pamoja na wale walio ndani.
Mama Victor: Mjakaz
Mkataba: Nafanya kazi ya kufua kutoka jumatatu hadi jumamosi, kutoka saa mbili asubuhi hadi saa kumi na moja jioni.
Hongo: Wakati mwengine unaandikwa kazi kupitia mkandarasi. Kazi inayolipa shilingi elfu tano inabidi umpatie mkandarasi elfu moja kwa kupewa kazi.
Unafanya kazi kwa siku ngapi ya wiki au mwezi: Nilifanya kazi kwa siku tano kwa wiki. Wakati mwingine, siku ya jumamosi kutoka asubuhi hadi mchana kwa shilingi 200.
Malipo Wastani: Shilingi 200 kwa siku.
Njia ya malipo: Pesa taslimu.
Umbali kutoka kazini: Kutoka Mathare 4B(nyumbani) hadi Eastleigh (kazini) ni kama kilomita tatu hivi.
Likizo ya mgonjwa: Hakuna likizo ukiugua. Ukiugua kazini utalazimishwa kumaliza kabla ya kuondoka. Wengine hawajali ikiwa unaugua.
Likizo ya uzazi: Hakuna.
Fidia: Hakuna. Waajiri wengine hukupeleka hospitali na kukuacha huko bila kulipia matibabu.
Athari za kazi: Mashidano kutoka kwa waliohamia nchini Uganda.WaKaramajong na Gisu wanakubali kati ya shilingi elfu mbili na elfu tatu. Ni vigumu kujadiliana ili upate angalau shilingi elfu tano kwa mwezi. Tunapitia unyanyasaji wa kijinsia, na kushambuliwa pia.
Gacheke Gachihi ni mtatibu wa kituo cha haki ya kijamii ya Mathare na mwanakamati wa kamati ya uendeshaji wa vituo vya haki ya haki ya kijamii Nairobi, Kenya.
Lena Anyuolo ni mwanachama wa maktaba ya Ukombozi na Kituo Cha Haki ya Kijamii ya Mathare.Yeye ni mwanaharakati wa haki ya kijamii na mwandishi Nairobi, Kenya.
The breaking point
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Image credit Ruaraka Social Justice Center.
In August 2019, the Mathare Social Justice Centre in Kenya���s capital city, Nairobi, held a gathering, “Why don���t Kenyan talk about capitalism?” Mathare Social Justice Centre is a community based organization in Mathare that conducts campaigns on political accountability and social justice and documents cases of extrajudicial killings and police brutality in the low-income areas of Eastlands in Nairobi. The event was co-hosted by the Centre, Africa Is a Country and the Review of African Political Economy. It drew on the work done in the ROAPE series, Capitalism in Africa, edited by political economist Jorg Wiegratz. Earlier, in December 2018, Jorg Wiegratz had written in Africa Is a Country that many African countries are by now capitalist societies and analytically need to be treated as such when we talk about or write about them. And as the Centre wrote to us, ���Kenya is deep in neoliberalism, characterized by high public and private debt, poverty, inequality, unemployment, stress, fraud, corruption, state violence, the criminalization of urban poor etc. In academic debates among scholars in Kenya, there is no analytical writing on the capitalist crisis in the country and on the capitalist political economy in Kenya generally.��� Now the Centre has partnered with Africa Is a Country to produce a series������Capitalism in My City������of posts and videos to document everyday capitalism in Nairobi. The project is funded via a Fellowship I received from the Shuttleworth Fellowship. The aim with ���Capitalism in My City��� is to ������ analyze capitalism in the manner with which we interact and observe it as opposed to a very academic approach of analysis.��� For this we are funding them to train eight local activists and other community members as journalists and videographers. The Social Justice Centre will train the activists to do research and reporting to produce eight publication-ready articles and four publication-ready videos. Over the next year they will publish a series of articles and videos to be published on Africa Is a Country. The articles will be published in Swahili and English. The editors of the project are two local activists, Gacheke Gachihi and Lena Anyuolo. Gacheke is a social justice and human rights advocate. Over the last fifteen years he has been involved in community organizing in Kenya. He is a member of Bunge la Mwananchi (the Peoples Parliament) which is an organic grassroots based social movement, and is also the coordinator for Mathare Social Justice Centre. Lena is a writer and social justice activist with Mathare Social Justice Centre and Ukombozi library. The first post is by Gacheke and Lena.
��� Sean Jacobs (Editor, Africa Is a Country).
For Swahili click here.
I am Gacheke. In 2017 I first met my friend Antony Adoyo, today a community organizer and participatory action research coordinator with the Social Justice Center Working Group (SJCWG), a collective voice for the grassroots social justice movement in Kenya. During that time, he was preparing to graduate from the University of Nairobi with a Bachelor of Economics degree. He was a young man under 30 years, who had the great dream and vision of working with the Central Bank of Kenya. This was the dream career for many students in his class who studied finance and economics. They all hoped that after finishing university, they would get a well-paying job. As we exchanged notes one day, my comrade to be Antony asked me if I could help get him a job with mainstream human rights organization as he was about to graduate. I was greatly surprised that a university graduate from the University of Nairobi, the first university in the republic of Kenya, was seeking a job through me, a community organizer.
When Adoyo graduated in 2017, he invited me and other comrades to his graduation ceremony at his parents��� home. It was a two roomed dwelling in Dandora, one of the poor neighborhoods bordering Mathare. We celebrated his graduation with a humble meal of chapatis and beef stew. His father later led us in a prayer; may his son bring hope and rescue his family from poverty, and relief for the hopelessness of the struggles for livelihoods in Dandora. This created in me a very strong impression of how ordinary parents have invested heavily in their children���s education as part of struggles for social liberation from poverty. For many university graduates, liberating their parents from poverty or even helping to pay back the loans that their parents borrowed to pay their university school fees will not be possible. It is a question of social justice that many young university graduates are struggling, carrying university degree certificates���for medicine, engineering, economics, biotechnology and nursing���that remind them of the pain of toiling through a university education only to ���tarmac��� (remain unemployed)for the next five years or more. They are living the crisis of capitalism in daily life. One student who graduated with a degree in sociology told me that she stopped applying for jobs advertised in the newspaper as she feared that she would one day find a groundnut (peanuts) hawker selling the groundnuts wrapped with copies of her academic certificates and CV. She had sent out hundreds of application letters for jobs in Nairobi and suspected that these were thrown out and then picked up and used by groundnut hawkers.
I am Lena. I have done various jobs during my university holidays. I have worked as a flower delivery girl, delivering huge bouquets worth thousands of shillings to the affluent suburbs of Nairobi, only to be paid 500 Kenyan Shillings ($5 USD) for a whole day of work. After spending the money on fare and supper, there was nothing left. As a waitress in one of the high-end coffee shops in Nairobi, I was paid 60 Ksh ($0.60 USD) an hour, worked six days a week for long hours standing all day, selling food that I can���t afford to the customers at the coffee shop, and generating sales worth hundreds of thousands of shillings for the company. Many of the waitresses and dish washers were university graduates who have worked in these slave-like conditions for over six years but can���t leave because there is no guarantee that they will find another job. And they know that there were many desperate university graduates and unemployed Kenyans who were willing to take the job for half the pay.
Mama Victor, another member of our social justice center working group and the coordinator of the Mothers of Victims and Survivors Network (for victims and survivors of police brutality and extrajudicial killings), worked as a casual domestic worker for six years in Eastleigh, a predominantly working class Somali neighborhood bordering Mathare. Many of the women domestic workers come from Mathare, Kiamaiko, Kariobangi, Korogocho, Kiambiu and other poor areas. They come to Eastleigh every day to look for work, and the desperation and hunger make them accept as little as 100 Ksh ($1 USD) to hand wash a big pile of laundry that can take over three hours to finish. Or it also makes them accept a big basin full of dishes for between 20 ���50 Ksh ($0.20���0.50 USD). On average, each woman is paid 200 Ksh ($1.87 USD) for the laundry job. Competition from the Karamojong and Gisu migrants from Uganda makes the struggle for survival even harder. Because of the living conditions, the Ugandan migrants accept to be paid between 2,000���3,000 Ksh ($20���30 USD) a month to be live-in domestic workers, a job that normally goes for 5,000 Ksh ($50 USD). Already, living on 5,000 Ksh a month is a starvation wage, because to rent a shack or a single room is 3,000 Ksh a month and the remaining 2,000 has to feed and clothe a family. Moreover, the conditions in which the women work are horrible. They face sexual harassment, rape and other forms of physical assault from their employers. Poverty is violence. It is a struggle for a dignified life in impossible conditions.
When we, Gacheke and Lena, spoke with our other struggling comrades, we heard about many other difficult situations. In Industrial Area, Nairobi���s industrial zone, the workers, who are mostly women, working in the horticultural companies exporting flowers or vegetables are subjected to dehumanizing conditions. The companies have a biometric system to check in. The workers have to report at 9.20 am and leave at 4.29 pm using fingerprints as their ID. Any lateness, of even one-minute, means that an arbitrary amount will be deducted from the wages which are 663 Ksh per day in one of the companies. Overtime is not compensated, and when it is peak season in the UK, they have to work longer hours in freezing conditions. The horticultural industry in Kenya generated 153 billion Ksh in 2018, yet the employees of these companies work in freezers all day without warm protective clothing. If one of them happens to fall sick, they are fired rather than the company incur the expense of treating their employee. The company bosses open accounts for the workers without consent and have access to the secret PIN numbers and can withdraw from the employees��� bank accounts at will. The Constitution of Kenya 2010 and the Labor Relations Act of 2007 gives every worker the right to join a union, but the companies surveil the movements of their workers and any hint of association with a union makes them vulnerable to sacking. The unions on the other hand do little to improve the welfare of their members and instead exploit the workers through membership fees. They are an extension of the greedy corporations, and workers are bled dry by the companies they work for, and are bled dry by the unions, their landlords and the taxes by the government.
The historical roots of the neoliberal labor market crisis can be traced to the early 1980s when the IMF and World Bank imposed structural adjustment polices to countries in the global South like Kenya. During this time, the neocolonial government was forced to stop investments in healthcare, education, housing and agriculture, so as to provide capitalists with a favorable environment for exploitation: to make super profits as basic services such as healthcare, education and housing were commodified and privatized. All of this has become worse during the COVID-19 lockdown.
We continue to struggle against state repression, violence and the dehumanizing legacy of a neoliberal capitalist economy whose guiding ideology is hate for the poor and greed for profit. Our friendship with Antony introduced us to many graduates from University of Nairobi, and we started a discussion session about the struggle for social justice and human rights in Kenya. It led to the formation of a network of university students who conduct political education in the informal settlements as part of creating political consciousness about the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Through the women in the social movement struggle, we organize against exploitation of domestic workers labor and sexual and gender-based violence. The Ukombozi Library (Liberation Library) links the social justice centers and the university students to consolidate the efforts of the students fighting against state repression, police brutality in universities and massive unemployment. It is the linking of our struggles between the students and informal workers, which will help us forge the path for political education and to foment a social justice movement in our struggle for liberation from the indignity of life in capitalism.
Appendix: Snapshots of Nairobi���s labor market conditions
Jackson: Security Guard
Nature of contract: I signed an employment contract with the firm that hired me. It explains the salary and the ways in which the contract can be terminated by both parties. It also has a code of conduct. I work 7 days a week from 5.00 pm to 5.00 am during this curfew period. On normal days, it���s from 6pm – 6am. My work is to open and close the gates and sign in and out visitors.
Was a bribe paid?: A friend told me about the job. I didn���t pay anything. The company then hires us out to the apartments, offices or malls that need to be guarded.
Minimum/maximum pay: I get paid 15,000 Ksh ($140 USD) a month gross.
Means of payment: A bank deposit.
Distance from work: From Kawangware to Kilimani area where I work is about 3 km. I normally walk to work.
Sick leave: The contract says we are allowed sick leave each year, but in reality it is difficult to get a full day off from work. I have to bring a doctor���s note confirming my illness to headquarters and, even then, they might deny you the day off. It���s a hectic process. Or if you���re sick for a long period of time, you just have to be tough and come to work or lose your job.
Maternity/paternity leave: No paternity leave is provided. There���s no maternity leave. If you get pregnant, you can���t do this job. It���s difficult; you���ll have to quit, or they���ll sack you.
Compensation for work injuries: None. You cater at your cost. There is an insurance for medical cases provided, but we have to co-pay 500 Ksh for every visit and it���s at a private hospital. It is also very basic and has a low limit. The doctor will also ask you to bribe them so that they give you a sick day off.
Occupational hazards: Drunk, unruly or rude residents who can twist a story and cause you to be transferred elsewhere that is far from home or lose your job completely. If the building is attacked, we have no means to protect ourselves or the people inside, as we have no weapons.
Mama Victor: Domestic worker
Nature of contract: I do laundry washing as casual labor. I used to work from Monday���Saturday, from 8am���5pm. Sometimes you are told verbally that you will wash many clothes, wash dishes, take the kids their lunch in school near-by, then wash the lunch dishes.
Amount paid for bribe: Sometimes you can be hired through a labor contractor, with a monthly income of 5000 Ksh ($46 USD), then you pay the labor contactor 1000 Ksh for getting the work.
How many days a month or week do you work?: I used to be a casual worker and I worked five days per week when there was work. Sometimes I would also work on Saturdays for half a day and be paid 200 Ksh.
Minimum/maximum pay: For one day, you get paid 200 Ksh.
Means of payment: Cash
Distance from Work: From Mathare 4B it is like 3km to Eastleigh, the place of work.
Sick leave: There is no sick leave. When you get sick while working you are required to finish your job then you leave. But for some they don���t care if you are sick or not.
Maternity/paternity leave: Not provided.
Compensation for work injuries: Not provided. But if you get injured at work, some employers may take you to the hospital and abandon you there without even paying the hospital bills.
Occupational hazards: Competition from the Karamojong and Gisu migrants from Uganda. Because of the living conditions, the Ugandan migrants accept to be paid between 2,000���3,000 Ksh a month. It makes it hard to negotiate for 5,000 Ksh. Sexual harassment, rape, and physical assault in the households we work in are other hazards.
The brutal beauty of Morocco���s Soccer Ultras
Raja supporters cheering on their side against Kawkab Marrakech in the Grand Stade de Marrakech. April 3, 2019. Image credit Stephen Higgins.
Yassine Oulheq of Morocco’s Connect Institute contributed reporting.
Zakaria Belqadi stands on a railing before a hoard of fans in the cheapest section of Le Grand Stade de Marrakech. He raises his arms, and the stadium begins to throb with the voices of young men. The song they sing has become well-known across the Arab world, and its lyrics have almost nothing to do with soccer: ���In my country they abuse me ��� Only [Allah] knows, in this country we live in a dark cloud.���
These are fans of Raja Casablanca, one of Africa���s most successful soccer teams. Raja has won 11 Botola (Moroccan domestic league) championships and seven various Confederation of African Football (CAF) titles, among other honors. For many young men in Casablanca���s poorer neighborhoods, Raja has become a way of life, and the team���s ���ultras��� fan clubs have even become organized, politically active and occasionally violent. Even so, this stand-offish band of boys provides a sense of home for young men in a country that doesn���t provide for them. And while the Moroccan government banned attendance at soccer matches in May due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ultras will not fade from the scene.
The Raja Ultras, led by the Capo (in lime green jacket standing on the railing between levels) fill the stadium with drum lines, chants, and songs. Image credit Stephen Higgins.Kamal Fadili, 25, walks into a crowded caf�� along the tramline in Derb Sultan, his neighborhood in Casablanca. Raja is playing. A small sign at the door reads, ���Raja fans only.��� As soon as the game starts, Kamal is out of his chair bellowing at the television. Periodically, he throws both hands above his head as if tossing a medicine ball.
Kamal has lived in Derb Sultan all his life. His hands are thick but gently knit, full of sinews that dive in and out of his knuckles. He has a scar on his left wrist where surgeons implanted an iron rod beside a broken radius. His palms are rough to the touch, and he uses them often to greet his many friends and family as he walks around the neighborhood. He has no official job but he doesn���t have an issue paying for a table at the pool hall, and he���s a gracious host, always buying coffee for his friends and guests. When it comes to Derb Sultan, he says it���s hard to achieve your dreams. ���There���s so much holding you down here,��� he remarks. He once thought about leaving for Europe. In the end he decided not to. ���It���s just too dangerous, and you can���t come home.���
Just over 70 years ago, Raja Casablanca���s founding fathers signed the team into existence in a stucco housing block in the heart of Derb Sultan, a five minute walk from Kamal���s house. The team began during the French colonial era as an effort by nationalist labor unions to create a Moroccan soccer team for and by Moroccans. The team���s founders used multiple legal loopholes to circumvent French laws and establish a team without a single Frenchman involved in its management (although the founders did include one Algerian man with the French citizenship needed to get the team off the ground). Since then, fans have organized and used soccer arenas to express themselves and speak out to the government.
Colorful walls and unabashed team pride covers the Casablanca neighborhood known as the birthplace of Raja, Derb Sultan. April 21, 2019. Image credit Stephen Higgins.Politically-minded fan clubs, later dubbed ���ultras��� groups, first originated in Brazil in the 1940s, but their spread to Italy in the early 1950s marked their development as a global phenomenon. Since then, ultras clubs have made a big debut in the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt���s ultras clubs were even instrumental in the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011, and Saddam Hussein frequently banned live attendance at soccer games because of Iraqi soccer fans��� political chants and signs. Moroccan ultras have also been banned from stadiums on several occasions, and they continue to spark controversy today.
Raja ultras��� songs, which they chant in unison at each match, often directly challenge the government. The group���s most famous song, fibladi daalmouni (in my country they oppress me), has even spread beyond Morocco. Algerian protesters picked up the song as a cry for political change in their demonstrations last year. Around the same time, a Palestinian protestor in the Gaza strip posted a video of herself singing the song on YouTube. Boats of Moroccan migrants have belted out the song in the straits of Gibraltar.
Raja���s ultras are known for challenging the police. At most games, the police come ready with a special bucket for putting out the flares that ultras throw at them during the match. The ultras also orchestrate ���tifo��� choreography. The latter refers to the hundreds of colored panels used to create giant images in the stands. In the past, some of the tifos have been so controversial that the ultras are now required to show the police their designs before they put them up in the stands. Some of the Ultras��� lyrics go so far as to taunt the police. In the songs, the Ultras mention their own genitals in crude ways and describe themselves as ���above the law.���
Famous for its ���Raja��� green feathers, the chicken is a symbol of the superfans living throughout the Derb Sultan neighborhood. Image credit Stephen Higgins.Vandalism, fistfights and robberies are not uncommon after Raja games. For years, the Casablanca Derby, a game played between Raja Casablanca and its rival team, Wydad, was known as the ���Derby of Death��� for its dangerous atmosphere. In 2016, Raja���s ultras became infamous when two sects of ultras fans, both supporting Raja, clashed in a violent episode after a game. The incident left two fans dead, and numerous ultras in police custody. Skwadra (Zakaria Belqadi), the Raja ultras��� capo, who coordinates all the cheers and dances for the group, was sentenced to almost two years in prison on charges of inciting violence. Throughout his sentence, he continued to lead the ultras��� chants from prison, relaying directions over the phone. Nonetheless, ultras have continued to taunt security forces despite threats of arrest.
Ibrahim Oulmaati, an ultra from Derb Sultan, and the Raja ultras��� un-official YouTuber, remembers the day that two fans died in the stands in Al Hoceima. ���It was absolutely crazy, everyone was pushing everyone,��� he says. Ibra, as he���s commonly known, has achieved over 370,000 subscribers on YouTube, and has traveled as far as Egypt to meet ultras and share stories with them. Despite the violence, Ibra finds security with the ultras: ���It���s [the Raja ultras] like school, I���ve met all my closest friends there,��� he says. The feeling of being in the stands, surrounded by other ultras, ���is just happiness.���
The ultras��� school-like atmosphere has achieved academic attention. Far from the smoke and noise of the stadium, in Casablanca���s placid suburbs, a group of about 40 academics and students shuffled into a classroom at the Hassan II University in April last year. They gathered for a lecture by Dr. Abderrahim Bourkia, a sports journalist and professor at Mundiapolis University, who has just published Des Ultras dans la Ville, Bourkia���s latest book about Morocco���s ultras and their behavior. Dr. Bourkia is a believer in the ultras��� power for good. ���It���s a place where they [the ultras] learn the collective life���everyone has a place and a task,��� he said. At the moment, it���s difficult to tell the future of Morocco���s ultras. In Egypt, Al-Sisi���s government has temporarily banned ultras activity, and in Morocco, there have been times when the ultras have also been banned from attending games, but Bourkia doesn���t know if that���s the right answer. Bourkia sees the ultras as a way for young men from hard neighborhoods to find their place in society, to become part of an active, motivated community, and develop social skills. ���It���s all about finding your place,��� he remarked.
Artists compete for wall space when trying to represent their team. Image credit Stephen Higgins.It���s this kind of struggle that has made Derb Sultan such a hotbed for soccer super-fandom. Today, Raja is still known as the people���s team in Derb Sultan, a neighborhood that has become somewhat infamous for its talented residents. Famous musicians, soccer players and rappers have all come from Derb Sultan. It���s neighborhoods like these where the ultras have their strongest foothold, neighborhoods where reality is usually quite harsh, even if dreams fly high.
Approaching from the north, visitors pass through the shaded boulevards and tree-lined alleys of Casablanca���s posh Habbous neighborhood, eventually walking past the forty-foot cement walls of Moroccan King Mohammed V���s Royal Palace before reaching Derb Sultan. To enter the neighborhood itself, visitors must cross a wide bridge over a trash-laden gully, split down the middle by a pair of train tracks. Visitors might spy groups of young boys gathered along the tracks, cussing, fighting and threatening each other. Just past the bridge is a grain market. Men hump swollen polyester bags of corn meal across the market, sipping tea from skinny glasses as they sit down on stools. Some sit on the ground immediately in front of others, enjoying violent but generous massages after shouldering so much weight. In the back corner of the square squats a small cubic structure made of sheet-metal, the words ���Mosque: There is no God but God,��� spray-painted in Arabic above the gaping entrance.
Once they���ve passed the grain market, visitors are advised to pocket any valuable belongings, but keep cash handy, because Derb Sultan is home to one of Casablanca���s cheapest markets for Chinese manufactured goods, fresh off the ships in Casablanca���s bristling industrial harbor. In the summer, the air in the souqs is hot and thick with conversations that bubble up and ebb away in fits of Moroccan Arabic. It���s hard to separate the smell of frying fish from the pungent scent of garbage.
A lifelong Raja supporter, the owner of Cafe Mzilate has hosted generations of fans in his establishment. Image credit Stephen Higgins.When game day comes around (and there���s no pandemic in the way), the neighborhood warbles with excitement. Many ultras travel together to see the match. They arrive in rambunctious groups, shoving each other before the entrance to the stadium. The only calm moment before the start of the match is the pat-down by stern-eyed army officers who remind each fan that they aren���t allowed to bring hash, flares, or lighters into the stadium (all rules which are routinely ignored). When the ultras enter the stadium, they immediately become lighter on their feet, practically floating to their place amongst their green-clad peers, bellowing songs they know by heart (usually learned from YouTube videos). Some of them have pro-Raja designs shaved into the sides of their heads, others have pro-Raja tattoos on their arms and hands. All of them are wearing some form of Raja apparel. Their dance moves are synchronized, and they chant to the beating of resounding drums. At their helm, small and green like a lime-flavored jellybean, is one man, the capo, directing thousands of youths through their songs and dances. He sends out signals to the various sections of fans around him: sometimes they whistle, other times they clap.
Between the fans and the police runs a trench, some 12 feet deep and nine feet wide. Behind a line of soldiers are three firefighters, between them a bucket used to put out flares the ultras may throw onto the side of the field. The ultras shout jeers and taunts at the police.
The sun sets on the arena, the swallows come out to eat bugs by the stadium lights, and the match comes to an end, but the Raja ultras stay in the stadium for about an hour. Standing as a unit in the southern curve of the stadium, they chant so loudly that they can be heard from well beyond the parking lot, an eerie but invigorating reminder that the Raja ultras don���t have to go home, because home is where the football is.
June 10, 2020
Lockdown 2.0
South African Police Services ahead of the national lockdown, Mar, 26 2020. Image via Government of South Africa Flickr CC.
Collins Khosa was killed for the temerity of enjoying a beer on his stoop. He was beaten to death and humiliated by South Africa���s security forces who poured beer on his bruised and battered body to send a message to those who dared question their right to enjoy a cold lager during a difficult and stressful time. South Africa banned alcohol and tobacco sales at the beginning of its COVID-19 lockdown; alcohol sales are back as of June 1, but tobacco sales remain prohibited. South Africa has charged more of its citizens for lockdown violations than any other country in the world, over 230,000 of them.
Now the government responsible for Collins���s death and the pathetic whitewash of an investigation, which cleared those responsible soldiers from the South African Defense Force (SANDF) of all charges, has suggested that the slain Collins got what was coming to him due to gender inequality (he lacked respect for two female soldiers they claim), and is launching its own Black Lives Matter campaign in solidarity with another black man who lost his life at the hands of the police���George Floyd. Collins wasn���t alone���36 others were killed between March 26 and May 5 alone (10 in lockdown-related operations).
I don���t think I really have the capacity to process this level of dishonesty and hypocrisy, but I���m going to try to offer some thoughts: We should not let revisionist accounts which divorce Khosa���s death from the authoritarian militarized prohibitionist lockdown which saw hundreds of thousands of mostly black and working-class South Africans facing criminal charges, dominate.
I returned home to South Africa about a week before our lockdown started from Brazil, where I was living and working. President Cyril Ramaphosa���s initial speech explaining the scale of the crisis and how he planned to address the pandemic won my and the overwhelming majority of South Africans��� support. What a relief this calm, measured address and clear plan was compared to the homicidal lunacy of Jair Bolsonaro.
Now some months later, I along with many other South Africans are asking, what exactly did the government do with the time they gained through the lockdown? We know now that only 207 additional Intensive Care Beds and 350 ventilators were added to public hospitals. We know that the government failed to provide emergency grants to those who urgently needed them, and then boasted that they saved a measly R16 million (about US$1 million) by knocking those ���ineligible��� from the roster. We know that millions went hungry as not enough food packages arrived, and those that did get fed were overwhelmingly done so by civil society.
We know that tens of thousands were arrested for daring to calm their nerves with a smoke or a beer during this unprecedented crisis. We know that Police Minister Bheki Cele boasted about the arrest numbers���no other country that I know came anywhere close to criminalizing that proportion of the population.
We also know those countries and regions in the developing world with the most effective responses to the pandemic���the Indian state of Kerala and the nominally communist government of Vietnam���were precisely so successful because they had high degrees of buy-in and mobilized their populations to work collectively to limit the havoc caused by COVID-19. Even if all of the criticisms against South Africa���s government don���t stick���as they almost certainly won���t���I don���t believe you can deal with the invisible enemy of a virus by criminalizing a huge part of the population.
In what seems sadly predictable, the virus has now reached and continues to transmit itself through all the places that continue to define South Africa���s brutal legacy of racialized inequality from the mines to the townships, and packed taxi ranks. We know that food prices have increased dramatically, and we also know that the price of a taxi ride has increased at a staggering rate. It has never been more expensive to be poor in South Africa. We also know that cabinet members tried to block NGOs from providing food aid during the crisis.
I voted for Cyril Ramaphosa and the African National Congress in last year���s elections. And while I still don���t regret my vote, it was not out of any love for the president, but out of despair. Indeed, this despair is reinforced by the realization that although Ramaphosa enjoyed an unprecedented degree of political capital at the start of the pandemic, most of it has been squandered. There is still no real alternative to the ANC in South Africa. The opposition���s lacklustre���and I���m saying it nicely���response to the crisis has further demonstrated it.
The Western Cape, where I am currently based, is the epicenter of South Africa���s pandemic. It is governed by the Democratic Alliance (DA). I have no idea why this is the case, but the party has veered from responsibility to political opportunism, to the usual brutality directed against the poor. The City of Cape Town has been dumping homeless people in an overcrowded camp in a lower middle-class colored suburb where they lack access to infrastructure, far away from the white suburbs closer to the city. It also continued carrying out evictions of people squatting on city land in the middle of the pandemic, despite evictions supposedly being suspended under lockdown regulations.
Ironically, rather than the left or the trade unions, it was left up to the DA to launch a legal challenge to the government���s failure to provide its promised emergency grants.
As for the Economic Freedom Front, the country���s third largest political party, they have veered from calling for those infected to be quarantined on Robben Island to criticizing the government because the lockdown wasn���t harsh enough for them. The leaders of the party, well known for their love of expensive liquors, are now ardent prohibitionists.
Parliament doesn���t really exist at the moment; it has performed none of its oversight duties. Once again, much of governing and oversight has been outsourced to our judiciary. While our judiciary has a key role to play, it is a sign of the despair that we find ourselves in that basic duties, such as publishing a list of rules of engagement for the SANDF, were forced upon government by the courts.
We can’t continue with the judiciary acting in place of an effective opposition or parliament. It is just not a sustainable political arrangement. This is not to slight any of the lawyers or judges that have done extremely important work. It is rather a sign that the ANC still faces few political costs for its screw-ups. The opposition doesn���t have either enough power or ideas, and so once more basic tasks of government are taken up by the judiciary.
This isn���t so much the usual form law-fare or the judiciary being the preferred political battle ground, but rather the judiciary is increasingly taking upon the basic task of government itself. Disbanding broken municipalities across the country is just one of those judicial prerogatives because the ANC simply cannot get its own house in order to get rid of criminally incompetent officials with real power. Until the government faces political costs for its screw-ups rather than simply legal ones, I’m unsure how much will change as the virus runs its course through South Africa. As always, the poor will be the brunt of it.
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